Thriday

This is crazy shit. I'm sat here waiting for the latest version of the Terrorism Bill to be printed, be sent back to the Commons, get amended once again by the Government, then once more make its sorry way back here. Current estimates are that we'll be done by 5am, but that assumes that the Lords will finally cave in the next time they have to vote. That's not impossible. The majorities are already getting smaller, and some of the older Lords have already gone home. Still, if they somehow rouse themselves to vote against it yet again, the whole printing and debating business will have to go on all over again, which could mean we still wouldn't be done by 9am. It's still technically Thursday, too, as the sitting hasn't finished.

Apparently we're sending out for pizza to keep us going through this hiatus. It's not guaranteed, though; they tried to order pizza at some point last year, but the restaurant refused to deliver, as the Houses of Parliament don't have a street number.

Thriday II

1.30am

The pizzas have arrived. When a couple of staff went out of the main entrance to pick them up, a news crew huddled in the cold, for want of anything more interesting, started filming them. Whenever the story comes around on the 24-hour news channels we keep a sly eye on it, to see if they've used the shot of two women carrying a stack of Domino's pizza boxes in to St Stephen's Lobby in the middle of the night.

The Clerk of the Parliaments came up to see us and thank us for ploughing on. "I'm the cause of all your trouble," he said. "Sorry." I told him in that case he was also the cause of all our pizza, so it wasn't all bad. Really we needed some wine to set everything off, but we're all agreed that sinking a bucketload before the Lords reconvene at 5 would be, at best, injudicious. (Not that that seems to have stopped most noble Lords, some of whom seem over the last couple of hours to have developed an amazing capacity to walk into things.)

On the other hand, popping over to the Press Bar, which is staying open specially until 2, might just hit the spot.

Thriday III

3.00am

Just the one whisky. Anything more would be foolish.

strictlytrue was in the Press Bar, taking advantage of its one-off liberal opening hours. We went to watch the Commons thrash it all out. A packed house of pissed MPs goaded and bayed at each other. I know that cliché demons will defecate in my frappé for this, but seeing it all on TV is precisely NOTHING compared to being there in person. When you leap up to the dispatch box to rebut your enemies’ point, and your entire party are cheering you and bating the opposition (with a fair bit of anti-gout cordial inside them, it has to be said), and you're riding this astonishing wave of noise, whipping yourself into a crazed moral fervour—it must be like riding the biggest motorbike in the world.

Charles Clarke had a piece of paper thrust into his hand by an assistant, and he stood up and read it out like an automaton, despite the fact that it had sod all to do with the point the Tories were banging on about. It was hard to know whether he thought he was being cleverly evasive or if he was just too drunk to tell.

The opposition had picked up on something Blair had said that appeared not to be, strictly speaking, entirely true [Massed crowd: Gasp!]. John Gummer, in Blair’s absence, said as much, to appalled howls from the House. The Speaker ordered him to withdraw the accusation (Hon. Mems can’t accuse other Hon. Mems of lying). Gummer retracted, saying instead that “the Prime Minister often manages to be misunderstood—even by his own Home Secretary”.

Michael Howard kept insisting loudly that the PM be made to come to the chamber “RIGHT NOW!” and face the accusations that he had lied to the House. The Speaker plaintively pointed out that he couldn’t force anyone to turn up. Shortly afterwards the House voted, and trooped rowdily through the lobbies. When they resumed, Howard leapt to his feet and brandished the voting list. The Prime Minister had voted. He was in the building. He had gone through the lobby, and then scampered off again to wherever he was hiding. There was no sign of him. Contempt? Confusion? Cowardice? Or an astute and adroit manoeuvre by an unparalleled political genius? We’ll have to wait for the memoirs to find out.


Post office vans make deliveries in a narrow courtyard. There’s no room for them to turn round, so there’s a huge turntable in the tarmac to do the job for them. We discovered that it can go round really fast even when there isn’t a van on it. We played on that for a bit after we left the Press Bar. None of us were sick, and no-one came and discovered us, which was probably just as well.

Thriday IV

4.45am

One of the freelancers just reappeared. She'd hared off to Ronnie Scott's for a couple of hours. She'd been quite legitimately earning mind-crushing amounts of overtime listening to a trombonist who used to play with Dizzy Gillespie.

Thriday V

6.00am

To their eternal credit, they showed up. Come 5am, most of the Lords were sat in their seats, in fighting mood. We honestly thought the night would have exhausted them, if not killed them outright, but Baroness Someone (look, I'm new, I don't know most of them from a hole in the ground) had been inviting them all to a "pyjama party" at her house round the corner. A good few of them will have sloped off to hers for a glug of port, while a few more will have settled down for an interim snooze in their offices dotted about the building. And now here they all were, fiery-eyed and itching for a scrap.

Not that this could up the speed with which they actually move, though; I had plenty of time to duck out of the lobby when the vote was called. (They lock the doors, and then you can't leave the Chamber for eight minutes while they shuffle through to vote.) "Can you let me out before the rush starts?" I asked the doorkeeper in the 'No' lobby - on this occasion, the lobby for Lords supporting the government. "No bloody rush on this side, is there," he muttered as he unlocked the door for me to slip out. "Three-line whip and just 96 people. Pathetic."

And he was right. Endless Thursday has proved many things - that Blair is now a cast-iron liability; that Charles Clarke is probably an android; that Parliament shouldn't sit for 24 hours straight because by the end everyone will be drunk - but chief among them is the fact that you can't tell Peers what to do. On Wednesday night I passed David Davies on his mobile phone, bitterly bemoaning the fact that the Tory whips couldn't control their own people. An entirely elected chamber would probably have caved in the face of Blair's continuous "They're coming for us!" pronouncements. This bloody-minded lot saw him for what he was and stood their ground. Consequently, when he stumbles back into office later this year, expect their reform to be high on his to-do list. And, if this Bill is anything to go by, expect him to deal with it by casually spunking out some ill-considered nonsense on the back of a receipt and calling it The Law.

They've just sent some of us home. As the pattern of this session has now been set, with about four hours between sittings, and each sittng lasting about an hour, they'll be able to cope with a reduced staff working in shifts. Now I'm jet-lagged. Ronnie Scott's isn't still open, is it?